Word frequency in text

The Python script below counts the frequency of words in a text (continuous sequences of letters excluding punctuation) and outputs a table of results.

It works correctly. The question is: can the same thing be done more simply (e.g., with fewer lines of code) in Python, Bash, PHP, Perl, or is this the best way?

import sys
import string
file = open(sys.argv[1], "r")
text = file.read()
file.close()
table = string.maketrans("", "")
words = text.lower().split(None)
frequencies = {}